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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28278855">The Wander and Wonder Place</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/tjs_whatnot/pseuds/tjs_whatnot'>tjs_whatnot</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Northern Exposure</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 22:29:49</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,926</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28278855</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/tjs_whatnot/pseuds/tjs_whatnot</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Because it's Alaska, it comes when Joel no longer needs it. And because it's Cicely, it comes and goes...</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Yuletide 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Wander and Wonder Place</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/cher/gifts">cher</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Just a little treat for you, Cher. I really loved your letter and I really loved these characters. Thanks for giving me ideas to play with.</p><p>♥</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Joel Flieschman walked through the woods nestled behind the two streets that made up the town. He had told Marilyn he was going out for some fresh air, but he was really just trying to keep the homesickness at bay. It wasn’t as hard to be out of New York as it had once been, he didn’t spend every single moment anymore comparing everything and everyone with the city. But, this time of year, it was always hard. Autumn. It was his favorite season in New York. The colors of the trees exploding with variety and brilliance, the crispness in the air in Central Park, the lights of Time Square setting the streets in neons earlier and earlier as the twilight golds and burnt oranges split the city streets in swaths. </p><p>Alaska was beautiful, he could now admit that, but the part of it he lived in had only two colors, green and white. It was either trees and shrubs and bushes that almost entirely refused to turn any color but green no matter how little sun they got, or it was snow covering every single thing, making it feel dark and luminous at the same time. There was no in between. </p><p>Then there were the smells. Again, he’d finally come around to actually enjoying many of the smells of Alaska, the fresh air, the trees, flowers, the ways the rapids changed the smell of the water in the river, the fires that burned from every fireplace or public pit for 8 months of the year. But, they were predictable and never changing. New York changed smells almost every block. From the hot dog and pretzel carts with their meaty water and burnt bread aroma wafting through the streets, to the explosion of various flora in the flower district, the steam shooting out of vents under the sidewalks and the rotten fish of Chinatown. It was a plethora of aromas that almost felt an assault sometimes, yet he still yearned for it daily.</p><p>He continued his journey, not paying attention to where he was going, which wasn’t the smartest of ideas out here where one wrong turn could get him completely lost and alone. Yet, he wasn’t afraid. He had gotten lost several times, but he’d always been brought back… somehow. He was sure he’d find a way back this time too, or someone would find him. Or he’d find someone. It’s just the way it worked here. That’s one thing that didn’t happen in New York. The weirdness. That was very Alaska. It was green, and smelled of fire and was mostly cold. And sometimes it was weird.</p><p>Something flitted among the treetops in the distance and Joel looked up to investigate. It looked golden and floated like air. It came closer, lower. Was that… a leaf? A golden leaf? No. It couldn’t be. Only, suddenly there were more. A lot more. Hundreds, and they were falling all around him. He stopped moving, afraid to break whatever spell he’d cast, afraid he’d trip over something and lose this moment of magic.</p><p>They were raining down on him now and he pulled them from the sky and investigated them, gold, and red and brown and yellow. The forest floor was covered with them and he suddenly felt like he was driving north up the Merritt Parkway in October. He lifted his foot and placed it back down and almost laughed with the sound of crunching, brittle leaves. He kicked and a mountain of leaves flew up and spread back and down again. He skipped and listened to the rustling and then stopped. In the distance, like too far to be real, he could have sworn he’d heard the sound of a car horn, then another. He knew what sort of cars made that particular noise. Taxis. Only taxis. And only midtown taxis could make their horns sound so irritated, so inconvenienced. </p><p>He raced to the sound, knowing it was just a strange fantasy, but wanting to see how far it went. He wasn’t surprised that when he’d run out of the clearing he’d gotten lost in, instead of a Manhattan street, it was the edge of Cicely, he was however, a little disappointed. He wished he’d grabbed a leaf or two to remember it by. He also wondered if he’d ever be able to find that spot again. He didn’t wonder how it had come to be or what it meant, that was just Alaska.</p><p>In the week that followed, he didn’t exactly go looking for that space and that moment again, but he did find himself meandering more and more during lunch breaks and on the weekend. He didn’t think it was a fixed place, it definitely felt like something that would just appear. Still, he wondered how. He supposed he could talk to someone about it, but he wasn’t ready to do that just yet. He wasn’t ready to be ridiculed for his naivete or his homesickness, but he really wasn’t ready to be told it was his imagination. He wasn’t even ready to be told that of course it was real, after all this was Alaska, it wasn’t even the weirdest thing that had happened to him. No, it wasn’t any of that. He just wanted a little time for it to be… <i>his.</i></p><p>Finally though, one night, sitting at the Brick with Ed and Chris, sharing a pitcher of Red Hook and something they were talking about, something about some local legend made him curious to whether his forest phenomenon was an isolated oasis only for him or if they both had experienced it or heard of others who had. </p><p>“Ah, Susie Peterson,” Chris said with a far away dreamy look. </p><p>Ed nodded. “Tinseltown for me.”</p><p>“What?” Joel asked.</p><p>Chris began, “That place in the forest, where your mind wanders and you think of the thing that was most like home before you came here. Then suddenly your senses play tricks on you and take you right back there, right back to a moment in time. For me it was Susie Peterson. The first girl I loved, the first girl I ever went down on.”</p><p>Joel blushed, but Chris continued, “At first, the pine fell away to a distinctive smell of ocean and I couldn’t understand why when I was firmly in West Virginia in my mind and West Virginia smells of many things, but none of them are the ocean. But then I got this saltwater taffy taste in my mount and it all came back to Susie, how she smelled, how she tasted. I used to hold onto the scent and that taste as I traveled around the country so that I put it in my mind right alongside Maine, and Oregon and parts of New Jersey. And now, when I’m walking and wandering here in Cicely, sometimes it comes back to me all over again. I call it my Susie Peterson Place.”</p><p>Ed nodded. “For me, it just smells like the solution film is washed in, and sounds like the wind rustling through palm trees, the taste of Lobster Thermidor at Musso and Frank’s Grill.”</p><p>“But, how can those things be memories when you’ve never been to California and never heard the wind in palm trees or had that dish at that restaurant?” Joel asked.</p><p>Ed just shrugged. “I have a vivid imagination. Maybe I don’t need to rely on memory to make sensory associations.”</p><p>Joel wasn’t even slightly alarmed that any of this conversation made perfect sense to him. <i>Alaska, man, Alaska</i>.</p><p>“But how? Why?”</p><p>Chris and Ed both shrugged, obviously neither of them had ever bothered to ask those questions.</p><p>“Oh,” Ed sat up as if thinking of something. “You should ask Ruth Ann.”</p><p>“Why?”</p><p>“She’s the town’s historian. If this has happened to other citizens in the past, she’d know about it,” he answered and nodded.</p><p>Did Joel want to know though? Of course he did. Accepting weird as normal was one thing, but to lose the ability to be curious, to want answers regardless? He couldn’t imagine ever losing that instinct.</p><p>As luck would have it, Ruth Ann came into the office later that week for a check up and he had the opportunity to ask about what he’d found.</p><p>“Ah, the Wander and Wonder Woods, yes, I know it well, though I’ve never come across it myself,” Ruth Ann said after Joel had described what he’d discovered.</p><p>“You haven’t?”</p><p>“No need. Cicely has always been my home. Even when I didn’t live here, no other place made me miss it.”</p><p>“Is that what’s it for, to cure homesickness?”</p><p>“Well, yes. And no. Ask yourself this, if it were a balm for homesickness, why did you only now discover it? Where was it last year, or the year before?”</p><p>“So, there’s conditions on it. You have to be at a certain place in your… in your… acceptance, of... your understanding of what <i>home</i> is and what it means to you?”</p><p>“Very close. I’ll tell you what I know, what I’ve been told and then maybe it will make more sense to you than it does to me.”</p><p>Joel sat down at his desk and indicated that Ruth Ann could get off the exam table and sit in the chair opposite him.</p><p>She did and began, “It was 1910, and Cicely and Roslyn had been in Alaska for two years and had completely changed the town and its people, but Cicely’s health was getting worse and worse. Roslyn wanted to take her away, to find a place with warmer winters, somewhere dryer and civilized. Cicely refused. So Roslyn consulted with some of the Tlingit elders and between them and she, they created this place. A place Roslyn could take Cicely that would give her health the benefits it needed and still allow her to be close to the only place she’d considered <i>home</i>. Somewhere she could easily wander to that was full of wonder and magic and all that she needed to get some life back.”</p><p>“But it didn’t work,” Joel interjected. “She died anyway.”</p><p>“Well, who is to say if it did or didn’t? Yes she died anyway, everyone dies anyway, but who’s to say that she held out longer, if her life in the short time she had it, was more fulfilled from that place she went. We’ll never know.”</p><p>“Hmmm,” Joel hummed, not sure what else to say. He had more questions, but also, he had very little more that he really wanted or needed to know. It was an odd sensation for him. </p><p>“Did that answer all your questions?” Ruth Ann asked.</p><p>“I think so… only… Why now? Like you said, why not last year, or the year before?”</p><p>“Well, what would have it felt like to get that close to New York and not actually be there last year, or the year before?”</p><p>“It would have been torture,” Joel conceded.</p><p>“And what was it now?”</p><p>Joel thought about it. “It was calming. It was nostalgia. Like a postcard to pull out on the loneliest of nights, but…”</p><p>“But?”</p><p>“It was nice. But I didn’t leave and immediately want to go back, fight to find it, drive myself mad for one more moment, for one more smell, taste. It was… enough.”</p><p>“Enough. I like that. I’m glad you found it. I hope you find it again if you ever need it.”</p><p>He was glad too, and was sure that he would find it if he needed it. After all, this was Alaska.</p>
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